News

Oracle is officially launching Java EE 7 with a webcast later today. Ahead of the release InfoQ sat down with Anil Gaur, vice president of software development at Oracle, to find out more about this release and future plans

Oracle is officially launching Java EE 7 with a live webcast today at 9 am PT / 12 pm ET / 5 pm London, and a repeat performance at 9 pm PT / 12 am ET (Thursday) / 2 pm Sydney (Thursday). Along with the release Oracle has put out added a reference implementation for the specification in the form of GlassFish 4.0, and we are expecting to see an official release of Netbeans 7.3.1 in due course.

The internet has been buzzing this week with the news that Oracle has ceased to provide free time zone updates outside of the standard JDK release cycle. However, at the end of yesterday the firm appeared to have a change of heart.

JSR-353, the Java API for JSON Processing (JSON-P), has reached final approval ballot this month. JSON-P (similar to JAXP) consists of a Streaming API (similar to StAX) and an Object Model API (similar to DOM). Please note that this API does not include JSON data binding (similar to JAXB), and is unrelated to the more popular JSONP or "JSON with padding".

Following a first online call on January 18th, involving over 40 JUG leaders/members from around the world, the people behind the 'Adopt a JSR' program are hosting a follow up online meeting on Wednesday February 27th.

ThreeTen, the reference implementation of JSR 310 Date and Time API, is now included in JDK 8 build 75. The Java Time API for JDK 8 is under the package java.time, moving away from the javax.time package of earlier implementations. All the Java Time classes are immutable and thread-safe, based on the ISO 8601 calendar system, the de facto world calendar following the proleptic Gregorian rules.

Adopt a JSR Program is an initiative to encourage Java User Group (JUG) members to get involved in the Java Community Process (JCP) by adopting a Java Specification Request (JSR). The team behind the Adopt-a-JSR program is hosting an online meetup on January 18. This is your opportunity to provide feedback and contribute to JCP process.

In July, the Digital Energy unit within GE Energy Management disclosed that they were in the process of porting their Smalltalk-inspired programming language, Magik, from its own proprietary Virtual Machine, MagikSF, to the JVM. With the port now well under way, InfoQ spoke to project lead/architect George Marrows to find out more.

As JSR 342, the specification for Java EE 7, makes its way through early draft review the expert group is keen to get community feedback on a number of open issues. These include which of the new APIs should be added to the Java EE Full/Web Profile, as well as how to better align CDI with Java EE.

The results are in for the JCP 2012 elections, with the London Java Community re-elected and PaaS provider CloudBees being elected for the first time in the open vote. Following the vote, the SE/EE and ME Executive Committees will be merged into a single Executive Committee, which will start to focus on the thorny matter of IP issues.

At JavaOne 2012 in a panel session around the future of Java EE, the audience were keen to know whether or not WADL should be a standard part of JAX-RS. Although the panel were unable to agree, the audience appeared to be more pro WADL than against. So is this a good thing or is WADL still considered unnecessary for successful REST?

Dagger is a new dependency injection framework for the Android environment. It offers a subset of features of Google Guice (some of the developers work on both projects) but focuses on a lightweight solution in order to offer better performance. Dagger also attempts to report binding errors during compile time instead of run time.

Following refactoring work carried out over the summer to simplify and refine the API, JSR 310, the long running Java Specification Request led by Stephen Colebourne to replace Java's complex date APIs, has been added to the feature list for Java 8. It is expected to arrive in January 2013’s milestone 6 release.